ABSTRACT
This contribution studies the impact of global travel on individual sensory habituation and its implication on European sensory regimes. Based on the evidence of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century travel accounts of employees of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) from towns in the German southwest, it explores issues which are at the interface of global micro-history, the history of the senses, and urban history: How did travellers react to foreign sensory experiences? Did these experiences have a lasting effect on their sensory habituation? How did returnees fit into urban sumptuary legislation that aimed at strictly regulating inhabitants’ sensory horizons? Tracing the sensory impact of work migration of global reach among the artisanal classes of provincial towns sheds new light on the global hinterland. Urban sumptuary legislation was not only challenged by the well-known social trickle down of global goods but also by individuals from below the local elites whose sensory experiences transcended the local and regional horizons. Those who wrote down or published accounts of their travels let their kin and social peers share (if only indirectly) their global experiences, which even distinguished them from members of the local elite. Provincial globalization was thus at least partly a bottom-up effect.
